The City of St. Paul is scheduled to be in court Monday morning, arguing against a state takeover of St. Paul's food and safety inspection system. Based on the apparent lack of a debilitating event, on St. Paul's long history of running its own inspections and a bias toward local control, our sympathies in this fight stand with St. Paul.

Everybody's for safe food in restaurants, groceries and everywhere else. The standards and procedures by which that's monitored and achieved matter. If St. Paul's standards and procedures aren't sufficient, as the Minnesota Health Department argues, they should be improved, and promptly.

According to city officials, that's been happening. After failing a state evaluation last year, the city made an agreement with the state to repair what the state said were deficiencies. The city says it's making good progress; the state says it isn't.

But this month's takeover move was a surprise to St. Paul officials, who contend that their safety record is at least as good as and oftentimes better than that of other communities, including those inspected by the state, and that their understanding of last year's agreement with the state was there would be more time to continue with redress of the state's complaints.

Safety standards and the inspections that monitor them are meant to be preventive, and residents and businesses ought to expect regulatory procedures to be consistent and effective.

Advertisement

But the bigger and more distant the bureaucracy, the more likely that rules alone regardless of facts will govern decisions. If there's a risk that a local inspection operation will get too cozy with businesses or politicians, there's a similar but larger risk that a more distant bureaucracy will lack accountability and the incentive to solve problems rather than merely adhere to rules.

That's not an accusation, nor a critique of how the state Health Department does business. It's simply an observation about human nature and the nature of organizations. The closer decisions are to the people affected by them, and to the people who would hold their decision-makers accountable, the better.

For now, restraining the state from taking over St. Paul's inspection apparatus is in order. We hope that's the result of Monday's court activity.

But if St. Paul officials, duly warned and now threatened with a state takeover, don't quickly repair the deficiencies they themselves acknowledge, the argument for restraining the state falls away, and they will have ceded a local duty to a more-distant authority.